Should Christians Give Markets Another Chance?

The Other Journal: Should Christians Give Markets Another Chance? Kathryn Blanchard. (HT: Jordan Ballor)

This is an exceptional article. Here is a Professor of Religious Studies who has clearly wrestled with basic economic concepts and learned the language of economics by talking to other academics from a theological perspective. (Be still my racing heart.) I'm not sure I'm with her on every point, but the overall thrust and many specific points are wonderful. And here is the kicker. She is a Presbyterian!

You know, having seen the work that people like Joe Small and Marcia Clark Myers are doing on vocation at the General Assembly Council, learning more about what PCUSAers David Miller and Miroslav Volf are saying about markets, work, and vocation at Yale, and after reading an article like this one by a Presbyterian Religious Studies professor, it is enough to make me want to become Presbyterian … oh … wait …..   J Anyway, here are a few excerpts.

Markets, like guns, can be viewed as instruments used by humans; they are not-entirely-neutral means to other ends. The purpose of some markets is human flourishing; of others, selfish greed. You hear it coming: Markets don’t exploit people; people do.

You will note that I am using the plural term “markets” rather than “the market” or the broader, more loaded word, “capitalism.” This is a deliberate choice and one that is necessary if knee-jerk Christian liberals like me are going to be able to take a more complex look at 21st-century economics. Speaking of “the market” in the singular implies the presence of a monolith, an impervious and impersonal machine over which humans have no control, and within which there can be no variation. Such an image stifles creative critical engagement by unwisely privileging the traditional voices of neoliberalism.

Feminist economist Julie Nelson has recently published a brief but marvelous work in which she challenges the dominant metaphor of the market system as “machine” and offers a new metaphor: the market as “beating heart,” a living entity that requires blood and oxygen for good health, rather than an automatic and impersonal hunk of mechanical technology.1 Nelson’s shift allows markets and economies to be measured according to how healthy they are in human terms, instead of assuming that “the market” is always and everywhere the same, in 1776 as in 2007, in Chile as in post-Cold War Russia.

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But this is not a dismissal of benevolence altogether; if we read Smith’s second great work in light of his first, it becomes clear that his musings on self-love and the division of labor are to be interpreted in light of his earlier thoughts on tradition-formed human sympathies.5 Stripped of its Dickensian caricature, Smith’s idea of a market is simply a relationship between people who need each other. Jane needs bread, Jamal needs wool, Jin needs bricks; they trade among themselves in a way that saves each of them a lot of effort and that benefits them all. Moreover, this trading creates an interdependent community built on virtue. At least ideally, markets—even when currency is substituted for bread or wool—are a win-win, not an antagonistic zero-sum situation, as many of us tend to think.6

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Like Smith, McCloskey insists that well-functioning markets depend upon people who are sympathetic to their neighbors (faith, hope, justice, and love), even while they are being creative in their solutions to their own economic needs and wants (prudence, courage, temperance). In this scenario—in stark contrast to capitalism’s well-earned “dismal” reputation—a market governed solely by self-interest is a perversion rather than the norm. In other words, with regard to my earlier example, family relationships are not to be likened to markets; instead markets could be likened to families. Capitalism for McCloskey is not merely a pragmatic least-of-evils; it actually has virtue built into it, as both requirement and consequence.

Thus, market economies are threatening to the Christian life only when interpreted according to a strictly utilitarian model. Such interpretation is favored by some on both the right and left, as McCloskey makes clear. (Her intended audience is the “clerisy,” intellectuals on both the right and left, some of whom find “bourgeois virtues” oxymoronic because the bourgeoisie is clearly evil; others of whom find it oxymoronic because the bourgeoisie requires no ethics in order to be bourgeois).9 But Christian ethicists are free to re-imagine markets according to new norms, and to judge them according to their particulars.

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But God’s redeemed creation does not preclude the presence of markets based on the division of labor, forward-thinking behavior, or human cooperation. Community-building markets do exist in our homes, towns, churches and nations, where people with various gifts and capacities find ways to make exchanges that create mutual benefit. With increasing education and consciousness, these markets could be harnessed so as to alleviate the negative externalities to which they give rise. With added imagination they might even benefit those not directly involved in exchanges—the earth as well as its human inhabitants. Because markets are organisms rather than machines, the goodness of a market depends entirely on its participants.

In short, markets don’t benefit people; with God’s help, people do.